Curse of hon­our killing

Fre­quent cases of hon­our killing in var­i­ous parts of country have ex­cru­ci­ated ev­ery sen­si­ble and sen­si­tive one. Thou­sands of women are mur­dered ev­ery year by their fam­i­lies, in name of ‘hon­our’. A spate of hon­our killing is un­fold­ing the real pic­ture of im­ple­men­ta­tion of law and or­der in the country.

Hon­our killing is per­ceived as a death, which is awarded to a woman or man for hav­ing ex­tra-mar­i­tal re­la­tion­ship or even in many cases be­cause of in­ten­tion to marry against the wishes of par­ents. In this crit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, gov­ern­ment must take rapid, sig­nif­i­cant and ap­pro­pri­ate steps to counter this hideous crime. First of all, the gov­ern­ment must ar­range sem­i­nars and pub­lic gath­er­ings, where peo­ple should be made aware re­gard­ing this is­sue. A proper cam­paign must be started on tele­vi­sion, ra­dio etc to catch at­ten­tion of soci- ety. In dif­fer­ent re­gions, lo­cal im­por­tant, re­li­gious and pres­ti­gious per­son­al­i­ties should be re­quested to also in­clude this so­cial is­sue in their talks and re­li­gious ser­mons. Peo­ple who are po­ten­tially at risk must be in­formed that le­gal help is avail­able and it must be quick and easy to ac­cess.

Even it will be ex­tremely ben­e­fi­cial step if this theme is in­cluded in our cur­ricu­lum as well. It is need of the hour that gov­ern­ment must im­ple­ment strict laws and en­sure their strict ex­e­cu­tion. Sys­tem of jus­tice should be made trans­par­ent and quick so that the pub­lic doesn’t take mat­ters in its hands. — Karachi